You have to admire the absolute gumption that Olivier Assayas demonstrated when he set out to make Irma Vep. His admiration for the brilliant Maggie Cheung was so sincere, he constructed an entire film around her in order to work with her, which led to a very promising partnership between the two artists, which extended into both their personal and professional lives, becoming one of the more endearing examples of a relationship being facilitated by the world of cinema, only made more interesting considering how the final product was a film that works equally as well in isolation. As a result, Irma Vep has established itself as an extraordinarily promising and complex work of multilayered cinema, a triumph that is as playful as it is thought-provoking, curated by a director whose passion for the story is only comparable to his sincere adoration of the actress that inspired its creation. Over a quarter of a century later, Irma Vep remains as fresh and compelling, a sharp and carefully-constructed satire that uses a range of different ideas to explore the process of creating a film, going from inception to execution, all the while having a few additional conversations around identity and the role of the outsider in the creation of memorable art, which may not be vital in terms of a narrative, but enrich the film and assist in helping elevate it to the point of being as cherished today as it was when it was initially released – and we have even more reason to appreciate Irma Vep, since Assayas has created a wonderful supplement that helps expand on this world, and prove that this is some of his finest and most inventive work to date.

We can wax poetic about how incredibly charming it is for the director to have made a film purely to get the opportunity to work with an actress he admired, but focusing too much on this relatively trivial fact inevitably distracts from the realization that beyond the mutual artistic affection shared between the two, the collaboration between Assayas and Cheung brought out a film that is incredibly subversive and experimental, and one of the most pointed indictments on the film industry ever constructed. Assayas, who started out his career writing about film, has a very precise way of exploring the process of creation, and Irma Vep contains some of his most complex ideas relating to art, which is something that often emanates from many of his film, regardless of the specific medium or section of the art world that they orbit around. He is quite simply someone who loves to create, not putting too much thought into the format, but instead focusing on a few basic tenets, namely ensuring that the story he tells is worthwhile, and that the act of taking it from the conceptual stage and putting it into practice is one that is smooth and enthralling for the viewer, without needing to be overly complex in a way that feels inappropriate or cliched. There are so many layers to Irma Vep, we can simply choose any single scene and start extensive conversations on all of them, ranging from the artistic themes evoked, to the actual merits of the filmmaking that went into their creation. This is a great example of how films about filmmaking do not need to be self-congratulatory or overly pretentious, and that they can be exceptional art all on their own, without needing to resort to the same hackneyed techniques that normally govern similar works.

One of the key components that prevent Irma Vep from being seen as inappropriate artist exploitation on the part of the director (who some may think chose to make it purely on obsession) is that Cheung seems to be just as in control of the narrative as Assayas is, playing an equal part in developing the character, which is evident in how it is essentially just a fictionalized version of the actress herself. It’s possible to even view this film as one that started as a work-in-progress, where various elements came together through the director’s collaborative efforts with Cheung, who was clearly given some freedom in crafting this version of her persona in a way that felt genuine, but also didn’t entail simply playing herself without any nuance – her ability to disappear into a role that is based entirely on yourself is an enormous achievement when done right, and contributes to the deeply complex meditations on the concept of celebrity that Irma Vep uses as its foundation. One has to imagine more went into casting Cheung in the role than the director’s insistence on being able to work with her – she has always been an outlier within the industry, being the subject of a great deal of forthright admiration by the legions of people who have recognized her inherent gifts, but she remains one of the most celebrated actresses, both within her native Hong Kong, and within the global industry as a whole, where she reigned supreme for a few years as one of the great stars of arthouse cinema – so having a film where she essentially riffs on her reputation (without becoming boastful) lends itself to a lot of meta-textual commentaries that makes her own career seem even more fascinating, since she has constantly been seen as an actress who had a contentious relationship with fame, which ultimately caused her to turn away from acting as a whole, making Irma Vep an oddly prescient piece of life imitating art.

As much as we tend to gravitate towards Cheung and her performance (which is certainly compelling enough to constantly draw our attention), there is more to Irma Vep than just her presence, even if the narrative does revolve around her for the most part. This is a film as much as paying tribute to the concept of a muse, focusing on how they inspire and aid creation, as it is a revelatory glimpse into the world of filmmaking, both in terms of the French film industry, and the entire craft, of which Assayas had a profound and deeply moving knowledge, which is evident in every frame of the film. It is an immersive experience, since a lot of it deals with the day-to-day routine of a film set, filtered through the perspective of someone who is an outsider, and rather than being invited in as a member of an eclectic cast and crew, she is relegated to the position of an observer, peering inwards to a world that somehow manages to be both welcoming and hostile to her. It evokes conversations on “the other” as a literary and cultural trope, and while Assayas doesn’t get too involved in this discussion, he does not do much to distract from it, meaning that there is some element of validity in viewing Irma Vep through such a lens. We’ve seen films about the process of creating one many times before, but few have felt as invigorating as this one, since it seemed to genuinely want to contribute to the body of work by showing the realities of a film set, albeit through an intentional darkly comical and heightened lens (and the presence of Jean-Pierre Léaud as the film’s volatile director must have been an intentional choice, considering his performance in another brilliant film-related comedy, François Truffaut’s Day for Night), and it all amounts to a very complex but unquestionably unique satire.

Irma Vep is a striking example of metatextual postmodernism at its finest, a daring blurring of reality with fiction, facilitated by a director whose firm grasp not on his craft, both the specific mechanics that go into a film’s creation, as well as the more abstract ideas, are represented in this playful and provocative exploration of cinema and its many different moving parts. It’s hardly surprising that Assayas recently chose to revisit the world of this film in a newly-minted miniseries in which he expands on many of the same ideas, but as strong as his efforts are, nothing can compare to the dynamic and original work he is doing in this film, which remains an exceptionally moving work of artistically-profound satire. The film may meander and go in many different directions, but it is all with purpose – it’s a tightly-composed, well-constructed dark comedy that pays sufficient tribute both to the original text that inspired it (in this case Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires, since it would be inappropriate to not mention this groundbreaking text that offered indelible contributions to the art of cinema), and the individual ideas that influenced Assayas to undergo such an intimidating endeavour. In an industry seemingly propelled by the need to remake or reconfigure old properties, seeing a film that does the same, just through a distinctly playful lens, is quite refreshing, and reaffirms the almost sacrosanct belief that what Assayas did for cinema can never be underestimated, since his impeccable work ethic and ability to find the nuance in every moment continues to make him one of the most consistent and thoroughly challenging directors working in the industry at the moment, and someone whose vision is only matched by his subversive ideas, which have been the foundation for many terrific films.